What I suggest is to stop hanging out with insane people because until the spiritual equivalent of toxo is discovered you might as well be careful. After all we see the effects of hanging out with insane people.

We know a parasite can make a male crab think it is a female. But that is not as bad as toxo. Toxo can cause a mouse to think of cats as sexually attractive. That is it is a parasite that can make one do self destructive things. But what else is out there affecting our behaviors without our knowing it?



The most interesting thing about cat woman disease is what Sapolsky mentioned: what else is out there that we are not aware of?
Obviously Howard Bloom has already dealt with this issue on another plane. The Super-organism plane.
But what about a spiritual parasite? Can there be the same as a spiritual equivalent of toxo? (toxoplasmosis).

What I suggest is to stop hanging out with insane people because until the spiritual equivalent of  toxo is discovered you might as well be careful. After all we see the effects of hanging out with insane people. There is no question that it is infectious. So far we do not know how it is infectious but we know it is. As the Rambam wrote "a man is drawn in his opinions the the people he hangs out with."

Letter of law of rituals while doing as much violence as possible to the spirit of the Law.

Hanging around with ugly stupid and insane people must have an effect on one eventually. No one is immune to the group they hang around with.

There are promises of improvement in all kinds of areas. But you never see someone improve in character or in learning. The effect is always negative. The result of coming close and connected with any of the groups is to take  a person that was kind, generous, and smart and make him rude, cruel, and stupid.
The defense that  heard given is that it is like an emergency room. Who comes to an emergency room of a hospital? Only sick people. But I can object to this analogy. People come to an emergency room to get better. Here people come with intention to get better from what is possible to see the get worse.

This can only be known by experience. Their words and writings all seem impressive. The only way to know something is deeply wrong is by observation. So based on the Chafetz Chaim Vol I:4 I have to warn people of the dangers. This is the same reason the Gra put that entire movement into excommunication. The reason is sometimes you need to warn someone of a danger they are walking into unawares.

There are plenty of ugly stories. But I do not need to go into them because everyone has their own experiences. But they choose to ignore the negative aspects because of the entertainment  and emotional value of the movement. It is fun and deep and has luminosity. The only problem is the luminous aspect comes from worship of human beings. It is not Torah. But it is dressed in the garments of Torah in order to entice people.

1. How close one is to God according to the Torah is not dependent on how close they are to a tzadik.
2. "Everything is godliness," is not what the Torah says. That is pantheism. The view of the Torah is Monotheism.
3. The Torah holds everything was created, something from nothing. Not from God's substance. In the Torah, God has no substance.

But these issues are not as obvious as the problem that the books themselves are filled with errors and distortions and promises that they can't keep and promises that they don't keep. That is there is no objective reality behind the promises.

But the thing that bugs me the most is not whether any doctrines are true or not. What bothers me is lying about what the Torah says. If someone wants to disagree with the Torah that is not as bad as disagreeing with it and then claiming that that is what the Torah says. That takes a kind of immunity to truth. And as fascinating as their books are they still filled with errors.


The fault is a kind of lack of concern by people that could have thought about this problem by instead buried their heads in the sand. This shows I think a kind of judgement--as if these issues are irrelevant. It is almost as if the people that did not speak out had some overriding interest to be silent. It can't be there were unaware of the problems. What I think is at least some people are afraid. They don't want to say what they think because of a good reason. They think that some invisible hand might punish them. They are not thinking whether this invisible hand if from the realm of good or the realm of evil. They just don't want to deal with this.


People need to be extremely careful whenever they submit themselves to a religious service. Research has to be done beforehand, for after all, whatever the sect or religion is we are opening our spirits in such places, opening them to all kinds of influences.  The teachers are currently just as damaged and broken as the  people, and so just as we choose our friends carefully, we must also choose our religious guides carefully. (Too many, many false teachers).


In any case this should not be taken as critique on the Baal Shem Tov of Reb Nachman, Heaven forbid. But rather the movement which went into something that the Gra knew was idolatry.

I should mention that the purpose of this blog is to ask hard questions. It is not to win a popularity contest.



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הדבר העיקרי שהוא  לא בסדר עם חסידות הוא העבודה זרה. אבל יש דברים נסתרים שנראים רצינים יותר. זה חייב להיות משהו יותר פנימי. להסתובב עם אנשי טיפשים ומטורפים מכוערים חייב להיות השפעה על אחד בסופו של דבר. אף אחד לא חסין לקבוצה הוא להסתובב בה. ישנם הבטחות של שיפור בכל מיני התחומים. אבל אתה אף פעם לא רואה מישהו משתפר במידות או בלמידה. התוצאה היא תמיד שלילית. התוצאה של מתקרבים ומחוברים עם כל אחת מן הקבוצות היא לקחת אותו אדם שהיה נדיב  ולגרום לו גסות, וטיפשות. ההגנה  הנתונה היא שזה כמו חדר מיון. מי מגיע לחדר מיון של בית החולים? רק אנשים חולים. אבל  האנלוגיה הזו לא מדוייקת. אנשים באים לחדר מיון כדי להשתפר. כאן אנשים באים עם כוונה להשתפר והמצב מחמיר. זה יכול להיות ידוע רק על ידי ניסיון. המילות שלהם וכתביהם  נראים מרשימים. הדרך היחידה לדעת משהו הוא  לא בסדר היא על ידי נסיון. לדברי חפץ החיים מחוייבים להזהיר אנשים מפני הסכנות. זהו מאותה סיבה שהגר''א שם התנועה כולה לתוך נידוי וכרם. הסיבה היא  אתה צריך להזהיר מישהו של סכנה שהם הולכים לתוכה במפתיע.

 כמה קרוב אחד הוא לאלוהים על פי התורה אינו תלוי  בכמה הוא קרוב לצדיק. "הכל אלוקות," הוא לא מה שהתורה אומרת. כלומר הפנתאיזם. ההשקפה של התורה היא המונותאיזם. התורה מחזיקה הכל נברא, יש מאין. לא מן החומר של אלוהים. בתורה, אלוהים אין בו חומר. אפילו חומר רוחני

Hasidim see themselves as more holy and thus closer to the truth than ordinary mortals. And they have the gall to ask us to pay for their holiness.

And I should add that there are people that set themselves up as teachers of Torah or who wish to bring other to Torah, They are the most dangerous of all.  The Zohar refers to them as תלמידי חכמים שדיים יהודאים  Torah scholars that are Jewish Demons.  The problem was the people making money off of Torah tend to lose their Jewish souls and instead are possessed by some demon.

There is a kind of problem that arises when Torah is made into  a mode of making a living. I think the Gra was aware of this. What you have nowadays is people have no other way of making money except by being a  a yeshiva and then asking people to support them and then they say they are not using Torah to make money. That seems like a contradiction.  If they are not working and asking for charity because they are learning Torah it seems that they are using the Torah to make money.

The reason this is important is this. I want to be able to say to people that in order to repent one needs to learn Torah. So far I am afraid to write that people should learn Torah because I fear they might take me seriously and walk into some yeshiva like the ones we have today. What will happen? He will walk into one place and they will accuse him of being there to steal their hot-dogs at lunchtime. So he will say that is just the exception. The next place will say he is a murderer or child abuser. Then he will start to see the pattern. The next one he will walk into he will wear fancy clothing. Or look like a university student. And then they will make themselves out to be his best friends. Thus it will go on and on. Every yeshiva he will find will be full of lies. The reason is none of them are for learning Torah. They are all money factories that care only about the money they can con out of secular Jews.

Until yeshiva will be about learning Torah alone, there is no way I can be responsible for saying they are good places.


Failure to be in accordance with God's Will  results, not from a failure to think for oneself, but rather from the fact that people are told what to think by people who see themselves as more holy and thus closer to the truth than ordinary mortals.